Incident Management: Benefits, KPIs and Best Practices
What is incident management?
Incident management is basically a process of IT service management or ITSM that is designed with the goal of restoring normal service operations after an incident as quickly as possible with minimal business impact. Incident management ensures that the best level of availability and service quality is maintained, even in the face of adversity.
In a nutshell, businesses leverage incident management to quickly respond to an unplanned service interruption or event and restore the services to their operational state with little to no negative impact on their core operations.
Incident management vs. problem management
According to the ITIL definitions, an incident is a single unplanned event that causes a service disruption while a problem is a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents. ITIL 4 also outlines the key differentiator between incident management and problem management – the purpose of each.
The purpose of incident management, as per ITIL 4, is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operations as quickly as possible. The priority of incident management is the return to normal service delivery. On the other hand, the purpose of problem management is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors.
The focus of problem management is the future, the identification and control of problems, and the thoroughness of the process, as opposed to speedy recovery in incident management.
Incident management vs. change management [h3]
As outlined above, incident management can be described as a collection of processes, policies, documentation and workflows that can help IT teams manage an incident from start to finish. However, IT change management is referred to as the process through which IT teams can modify the IT infrastructure, products, vendors, applications, processes or services of their organization in a systematic and standardized manner. The main objective of change management is to boost the success rate of the changes implemented within an organization and improve service delivery.
Why is incident management important?
Incident management is a crucial process for businesses as it helps reinstate normal service operations quickly after an incident, thus mitigating the negative impact of the incident on business operations, service availability and delivery. It helps maintain agreed service levels with your clients.
What is the goal of incident management?
Now that we know why incident management is necessary for organizations, let’s take a look at some of its fundamental goals as well:
- Improving the visibility and communication of incidents
- Ensuring that the standardized methods and processes are being used for efficient and prompt documentation, reporting of incidents, response, ongoing management and analysis
- Lining up and prioritizing incident management activities
- Ensuring that incidents are reported and resolved quickly
- Enhancing user satisfaction and maintaining the quality of IT services
What are the benefits of incident management?
The most important benefits of incident management are that it:
- Helps minimize the business impact of incidents and increase effectiveness by timely resolution
- Enables proactive identification of beneficial system amendments and enhancements
- Improves proactive monitoring, thus enabling accurate measurement of performance against SLAs
- Promotes dissemination of information on different aspects of service quality
- Enables better utilization of staff that in turn leads to greater efficiency
- Enhances customer and user satisfaction
What is an incident management team?
In an IT organization, an incident management team may be referred to as a group of trained personnel who are responsible for responding to an IT emergency. Typically, an incident management team consists of IT leads with inter-departmental participation and strong executive support.
What is the role of an incident management team?
The primary role of an incident management team is to align and coordinate key team members and resources during a cyber incident to minimize its business impact and restore service operations as quickly as possible. The team analyzes information, discusses activities and observations, and shares important communication and reports across the organization.
During periods of calm, when the team is not actively responding to or investigating an incident, the members usually meet at regular intervals to discuss and review the latest incident response procedures and security trends. This dissemination of information is important for retaining executive support and ensuring timely participation during or after a crisis.
What is the incident management process flow?
The incident management process is essentially a set of actions and procedures implemented to respond to and remediate critical security incidents. These steps ensure that no aspect of a security incident is overlooked and that the concerned teams are able to resolve incidents quickly and effectively. There are several key steps in the incident management process.
- Detection and Notification: The first step of the incident management process includes the detection and subsequent notification of the incident across the organization. IT teams identify incidents through manual detection, solution analyses or user reports. Notifications are then sent to the respective teams in the company.
- Logging and Prioritization: Once detected, the incident is logged, investigated and categorized based on criticality. Categorization helps determine the method by which an incident should be handled and the prioritization of response resources.
- Investigation and Diagnosis: After the incident task has been assigned to the concerned teams, the members can kick-start investigation of the cause, type and potential solutions for the incident. Once the incident has been diagnosed, the team can determine the remediation steps, including notifying the relevant customers, authorities or staff about the security incidents and informing them of any expected service interruption.
- Resolution and Closure: At this stage, the incident management team successfully eliminates the root causes of the issue or threats and restores the systems to full capacity. This step might be carried out in multiple stages depending on the type and severity of the incident.Resolution is followed by closing incidents wherein documentation is finalized and the resolution steps are evaluated. The closure step helps identify any areas of improvement and involves the implementation of proactive measures to prevent future incidents.
- Analysis and monitoring: The last step of the incident management process involves an in-depth analysis of what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again by means of constant monitoring of systems and processes.
Incident management KPIs and metrics
Key performance indicators or KPIs are metrics that drive critical decision-making. Top KPIs for incident management are as follows:
- Incidents over time: This KPI entails tracking the average number of incidents over a specific time period such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. It helps analyze whether incidents are happening less or more frequently over time.
- First-touch resolution rate: The first-touch resolution rate is the rate at which incidents are resolved at the first occurrence with no escalations or repeat alerts. As such, a high first-touch resolution rate would imply that you have a well-configured, mature incident management system.
- Reopen rate: Reopen rate refers to the percentage of previously resolved incidents that were reopened at a customer’s request. This usually happens when a customer replies to a closed ticket response or requests the reopening of the closed ticket due to the same issue happening again.
- Repeated incidents: The repeated incidents KPI includes the record of the number of identical incidents that have been logged within a specific time period.
- Average response time per incident: The average response time per incident represents the amount of time it takes to route an incident to the concerned team member. Tracking this KPI helps in determining how efficiently a team is able to get the concerned member working on an incident.
- Mean time to resolution: This KPI represents the average amount of time it takes for the concerned team to respond to or resolve an incident. MTTR is a reliable KPI that helps determine how fast a team responds to and resolves an issue as it arises.
- SLA compliance rate: The SLA compliance rate denotes the percentage of incidents that are successfully resolved within the SLA.
Incident management best practices [h2]
How do you ensure a robust incident management policy is in place? Let’s look at some of the best practices you must follow to ensure efficient incident management.
- Clearly define an “incident”: To correctly prioritize, respond to and resolve incidents, be sure to clearly define and categorize incidents based on different critical elements such as severity, urgency and impact.
- Underline long-term vision of incident management process: It is imperative to determine what your company expects out of your incident management process. This expectation can be defined by either the generic incident management template or a more customized process focused on your organization’s unique needs.
- Focus on incident communication: Make sure to keep both your internal teams as well as customers aware of all mitigation activities. Automating communication updates and managing them from a single dashboard is helpful in ensuring effective incident communication.
- Learn from major incidents: After a major incident is resolved, you must ensure to make organization-wide changes and implement change management strategies to prevent the occurrence of similar incidents in future.
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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog – Kaseya authored by Kaseya. Read the original post at: https://www.kaseya.com/blog/2022/01/12/incident-management/
